


A rainfall of crows

by 35391291



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 11:47:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7975699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/35391291/pseuds/35391291
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It is said that everything that hurts is worth being told, over and over.</i>
</p><p>A prayer for the Raven King.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A rainfall of crows

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this from Childermass's point of view at first, but I think it could be about Mr Norrell as well, or even Vinculus. The Raven King is intertwined with several (most?) of the characters, and they are a part of his spell in a way. Anyway, this made sense to 4 am me. (Note to self: don't drink and write).
> 
> Also, here is the companion to this story: [The realms underneath](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9453422).

From the sewers, the days look red as fire. Realizing this means that everything must burn. The night growls and threatens to step inside uninvited, like a knife with invisible fingers. It is another road to nowhere. Silence tastes like emptiness, and loneliness burns like a candle, like the abyss that looks at him, and knows he loves too many ghosts. The silence of the sea blends in with the smoke of memory, and the waves are always cruel. He is lost in a fog of pigeons, a rainfall of crows. Bundled up in bird skin and steps, this pain is like no other.

He is searching for a prayer and an anchor, a way to avoid the night swallowing him whole. His heart is wounded by gunpowder made out of stars. He has dreamt it up from cardboard and smoke, and hid it away in his chest like a bottle of pain, deep among the clutter: wood, metal, mechanical pieces, magical inventions, all the lonely remains of the night. It froze inside of him years ago, and yet it still feels like a sleeping volcano that first belonged to someone else. A thousand feathers crowd in his chest, trapped for so long that he is not sure how to set them free. But he has tried to ignore them, made peace with them somehow. Going to bed with dictionaries, flasks and ink-stained fingers. Stealing from the ether, the backbone of the sky and other people’s words, to create the memory of a reality he could live with.

He used to knock on the shared wall and scribble silent spells and sigils on it. Perhaps he is still there, but his face is covered. Eventually, he has to return from roaming all those innermost streets that the world forgot. He breathes in the sadness of rooftops, without knowing what the time lost between silences could be like. All those nights inside the fog. How could he ever forget? His mouth stumbles over the ashes, but he knows, he hopes that at least somebody loves him. He writes impossible prayers for the weary, tangled hearts of the birds. He looks into the eyes of the air, and finds his own mirror there, an uncertain parenthesis. He is infinite shipwrecks and explosions, breathing out hurricanes and knives. And he never cries, only when he imagines that they tear this meaning away from him. He would gladly lose his blood and his heart for it. Would it be worth the pain?

But the night will bind it all together somehow. Among the strange music of the wind, something remains. It is not about the search anymore, it is about the path, the road itself. It is said that everything that hurts is worth being told, over and over. Or it might be a lie. But there is something there, deep within, something that makes him wish to go on. There is a word that wraps him up in red. It hurts, like bloodletting, like a needle that is sharp, but deep down good. Sometimes he becomes like a splinter, and he stops trying. But sometimes, he believes. Under the half-light of the sky there might be a god carved by bitterness, a whiplash over the world. And he wants to try again now, this time with a lifeline of fingers and words. A silent explosion hides in the paragraphs of his prayer. His mouth remembers that hesitant, injured word. He steps forward, and reaches out to a king whose hands are both warm and cold, as if they contained every extreme and every corner of the world. He reaches out, and his despair changes to certainty. He is not a mistake, not anymore. He is now an unavoidable fate wrapped in a poem, a spell beating along with the heartbeat of the world. He vows to make this word brand new, by pain or by fire. Like smoke and silence, like hand upon hand.


End file.
